US fazed as Russia renews the Cold War

It is like watching history reverse itself. An age has elapsed since the Cold War ended and both sides resolved to work towards burying the bitterness. Then, suddenly, something stirred, both sides closed their minds and went back to where they had been twenty years ago. The Russian action in Georgia and the hostilities that followed have left the world brooding over what comes next… another Cold War at best and a nuclear holocaust at worst?

The actual events are trivial; it is all about the attitudes that sustained and deepened the divide. The violence could have been avoided, perhaps, if Georgia had not sent troops into South Ossetia to subdue the rebels and kill ten Russian peacekeepers in the process. But the rebels in South Ossetia and Abkhazia would not have been a real threat unless the Kremlin had issued a slew of Russian passports to the local population. And Russia would not have muscled its way ruthlessly into Georgia unless the West had welcomed Kosovo into its lap. One could go on forever… in the aftermath of the Georgian crisis, the Americans need not have sent humanitarian aid on military vessels and the Russians need not have bothered to step up their Black Sea fleet. It is impossible to fix the blame on anyone.

1. The Russian attitude: Russia has become a nation of opportunities, but in the process, it has, sadly, lost its only ever chance at becoming a democracy. With prices of both major Russian exports, oil and food, soaring in markets across the world, Putin, the former KGB agent, has had little trouble uniting his “resurgent Russia”. His politics is a cauldron of patriotism, a sense of wounded national pride and cold hard coercion. At the risk of sounding exaggerated, one must point out that some of these very things went into Nazi philosophy. The idea that Russia never really lost the Cold War… and will live another day to fight it … is one of Putin’s main arguments. Does that sound familiar?

Although some will protest his policy of blood and iron towards his detractors, the Russians are, by and large, content with Putin’s rule. The steep decline and chaos that marked the last decade of the previous century has been arrested and most Russians can look towards a prosperous future. The Russian people owe some of this to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man, who knew just how to set a tottering nation back on its feet, some of this to the fortuitous rise in oil and food prices and finally, some of this to a reckless America that bate off more than it could chew. Dictators are dangerous and this is even truer of popular dictators like Putin. The latter has lost no time in making the most of Russia’s wounded pride and declaring himself Russia’s absolute ruler. The most impressive show of power came earlier this year, when Putin confidently shoved a puppet Medvedyev into the President’s chair and continued to rule as Russia’s Prime Minister.

Putin and his people agree on one key aim that defines his rule: the desire to reinstall Russia as a superpower. The first step to becoming a superpower is, of course, acquiring a “sphere of influence”. The obvious targets for the Russians are the former Soviet republics and their million fragments. These areas are literally crawling with conflicting ethnic identities, nations without a sense of direction and people without a future. As such, petty squabbles swell into blood feuds and ragtag rebels provoke major conflicts. The monetary and military cost of power projection in these troubled areas is minimal.

Putin realized that Russia could afford this. The Europeans are too dependent on Russian oil to retaliate economically, while recent misadventures have made the US take the military option off the table. As the West celebrated Kosovo, Putin plotted revenge. Above all, he wanted to show the world the might of the Russian military. He wanted to match …uh, well…the United States in defying world opinion.

2. The American attitude: The US has been wholly caught unawares by the sudden possibility of power shifts in the world. This goes not only for the inept foreign policy advisors of the Bush administration, but also for the ruling elite in all political quarters, the intelligentsia and the common folk. But this is not to imply that the United States and its strategic partners have not done anything to provoke or exacerbate the situation. The evidence points to the fact that the US has often acted recklessly in the last ten years, too assured of having won the Cold War and too often sparing too little thought for the egos of others.

It would be preposterous to accuse the US of trying to encircle Russia with a definite view towards a future war. In fact, the US and the rest of the world might have to pay dearly for America’s reluctance to disable its Cold War machinery. Although the Warsaw Pact and the Comintern ceased to exist long ago, NATO has continued to expand, amassing ever more military power, building larger and larger missiles, persuading more and more countries into its fold. This is despite Bill Clinton’s promise that NATO would maintain a respectful geographical distance from Russia. From the point of view of the Kremlin, it is impossible not to see the constant wooing of Romania and Ukraine, the patronization of Georgia, the harbouring of Kosovans and the militarization of Poland as mean spirited at best and hostile at worst.

Caught unawares by the events in Georgia, and that too in a time of Olympic festivities in Beijing, the Bush administration took some time to respond. Beyond letting the two thousand Georgian troops return to their country from their posts in Iraq, the US could think of little else. Valuable time was lost as the US groped for a response; causing immense damage to America’s credibility as a strategic ally and deepening the impression in the Kremlin that the overcautious democracies would be too careful to act (incidentally, this is an impression that all dictators share).

Once things had settled down, some saber rattling was in order. The US immediately cleared a controversial missile deal with Poland and sent humanitarian aid in military vessels. Ukraine was prodded to raise the rent for the Russian Navy that has a twenty year lease to control the Ukrainian port of Sebastopol. The NATO vessels in the Black Sea soon outnumbered the Russian fleet; and this little to defuse the situation. In fact, the Russian commander of the Black Sea fleet commented that the NATO fleet could be destroyed in “about fifteen minutes”. The world has not heard such language for a long time.

3. The European attitude: They are the ones caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they have an organic dislike for the Russians and on the other; they realize that their dependence on Russian oil puts them in a difficult situation. Above all, the spectre of war is taken all too seriously in Europe. Little surprise then, that President Sarkozy was all too eager to broker the peace deal between Russia and Georgia.

By creating the European Union, the Europeans have managed to set into motion a wonderful process of human integration and civilization building. However most EU constituents have their NATO obligations and privileges, which they would not want to give up in a hurry. Europe also owes a debt of gratitude to America for its economic revival after the ruinous decade of the 40s. In most of Eastern Europe, Russia is seen as the traditional hegemon and in Western Europe, Russia is seen as the traditional enemy. However, the increased prices of oil and food and the steep rise of Russia after the ruin of the 1990’s have made it impossible for Europe to break away economically from Russia. In the tussle between America and Russia, Europe runs the risk of suffering the most.

The solution for the Europeans is, of course, to strengthen the EU. A strong Europe, without weak, disparate, smaller states, would be an economic, political and military entity just as eminent as the United States, too big either to be shoved around by America or to be seen as a soft target for Russian expansionism. This will effectively rule out the possibility of the emergence of yet another bipolar world.




In conclusion, we note that it is a major tragedy to watch Russia slip right back into the hands of dictators. And dictators do have a tendency to attribute the conflict of opinions in the democratic world to a weakness of will. Even so, one must point out that the responsibility for history lies with the democratic world. The solution for the free world is to tear itself even further from all forms of bigotry, build stronger democratic institutions and develop even more respect for the life of the human being. Cold War tragedies happen when Great Powers see people in “lesser nations” as “expendable”. This is exactly how Russia sees the people of Georgia and of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The US is about to subscribe to the same system of thought, with regards to the people of Poland and Ukraine.